Adm Mike Rogers testified to the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday, saying the US is still working on a comprehensive cyber policy to counter a ‘brave new world’.
Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The US National Security Agency tipped off French officials that Russia was hacking the country’s computer systems during the presidential campaign and is working with the UK and Germany to help shield their upcoming elections from Moscow’s interference.

The NSA director, Adm Mike Rogers, told a Senate committee on Tuesday that the agency tipped off its French counterparts before the hack of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign became public 36 hours before he won the second round of the presidential campaign.

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“We had become aware of Russian activity,” Rogers, who is also head of US Cyber Command, said. “We had talked to our French counterparts prior to the public announcements of the events that were publicly attributed this past weekend. We said, ‘Look we are watching the Russians, we’ve seen them penetrate your infrastructure, here’s what we’ve seen, what can we do to try to assist?”

“We’re doing similar things with our German and British counterparts, they have an upcoming election sequence,” Rogers added. “We’re all trying to figure out how we can learn from each other.”

The Macron campaign has described the attack as massive and coordinated, but has not formally blamed Russia. The French cybersecurity agency is still investigating the nature of the attack. The election commission said the leaked data apparently came from Macron’s “information systems and mail accounts from some of his campaign managers” – reminiscent of Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee last year.

Rogers comments to the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday marked the first western official assessment that the Macron hack was sponsored by Moscow.

The Macron files published on Friday contained metadata in Cyrillic, implying they may have been edited on Russian software, and even included the name of a Russian intelligence contractor.

Cyber security experts said that did not represent conclusive proof that Russian intelligence was behind the hack.

“If was to play devil’s advocate, if you are a sophisticated about cyber security, you know very well that you will leave metadata traces and you also know that metadata is spoofable,” said Aleksandr Yampolskiy, the co-founder of SecurityScorecard, a cyber security monitoring and rating agency. “The whole description sounds a little too sloppy.”

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Dimitri Sirota, the CEO of BigID, a data protection consultancy, said the digital fingerprints left in the metadata could have been just the result of sloppiness.

“Or they could be leaving a mark, that creates deniability but also a pointer of what is behind it. It helps create a fog,” Sirota said.

He added that as such hacking becomes commonplace in elections, campaigns would started to adopt a standardised model of cyber security, using encryption, and deleting more data from their systems.

“At the same time, consumers are going to be more aware of fake news. Nobody likes their elections tampered with and no one wants to be manipulated,” Sirota said. “I think you are going to see the impact of these kind of attacks being attenuated as time goes by.”

In his testimony on Tuesday, Rogers said the US is still working on a comprehensive cyber policy to counter what he called a “brave new world” in the cyber domain. He said the US is improving its ability to defend against cyber-attacks, but added: “I would also tell myself, Rogers, you are not moving fast enough.”